December 31, 2003

Sir Tim

Actor Kevin Spacey and Tim Berners-Lee

The British physicist, Tim Berners-Lee is to receive a knighthood from the Queen for "services to the Internet". He created World-wide Web in his spare time while working as a researcher at CERN. He fought to keep the Web free rather than patent it, which has led to the rapid growth of it. There has been a lot of controversy lately over the UK honours system. Recently the Sunday Times published a list of 300 refuseniks that had declined the offer of awards from the Queen.